Utah has approved construction of a new, highly energy-intensive data centre in Box Elder County. The site designated for the project, called Stratos, covers about 40,000 hectares and will be supplemented by an additional 1,200 hectares of military and state-owned land.
According to official materials and reporting by the Salt Lake Tribune, Stratos is estimated to require roughly 9 gigawatts (GW) of power. That is more than twice the state's current average electricity consumption, which is about 4 GW. The data centre will be built in multiple phases; the first phase alone would demand around 3 GW of power.
Because the regional grid cannot support a continuous load of this magnitude, project planners decided the site will include its own gas-fired power plant. The planned plant will connect to the Ruby Pipeline, an interstate natural gas pipeline of approximately 1,100 kilometres that runs between Wyoming and Oregon and passes through northern Utah.
Stratos is not the first data centre planned to operate partially off-grid: companies such as Meta and Google, among other technology firms, have pursued dedicated power solutions — including proposals for on-site nuclear sources — to meet their energy needs.
Project participants have justified the development by pointing to Chinese expansion in recent years: reports indicate that in the past 24 months China has completed roughly 400 GW of new energy projects, much of which supports data centres running artificial intelligence workloads.
No firm construction timeline has been disclosed for Stratos. Given the scale of the site and the planned on-site power generation, significant environmental and local quality-of-life impacts around the facility are likely.
